


How Freedom Felt Here

by Hecate



Category: Van Helsing (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Trapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 15:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8897254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/pseuds/Hecate
Summary: Axel, after the door closed. (Story ignores 1x13)





	

Axel doesn't remember much of the last moments before Doc closed the door to freedom and his life, doesn't remember the details of Jones' weight on him or the blows he delivered. It was all just the routine of a fight gone dirty and desperate, not his first one, the feeling almost familiar by now. 

But the moment Doc let go of the button that held the door open, the sound it made as it closed and the sudden spike of panic that ripped him open and made him stumble... That he remembers. He thinks he’ll remember for the little bit of time that will make up the rest of his life.

For the first hours after Doc ran away, this very memory kept him from breaking down. The doors closed, Doc left. That meant she could return and the doors could open. He held on to the idea with all he had. It was that kind of logic people tend to believe in when things get really bad, because if they don't, they would lie down and never get up again. 

But no one can hold onto these ideas forever.

Instead, he thinks of Doc, thinks of her running away as he fought for his life, thinks of her not waiting for the few seconds he needed. He could have made it through the door. She killed him, he thinks, maybe murdered him. 

He doesn't want to leave the door, stays near it for way too long. It's the only exit he knows, but he has never gone through the whole quarantine zone. Maybe there is something hidden in it he could use to get out, maybe there's his chance for survival somewhere in these halls. Axel gets up. It's the thing he has always done. 

He tells himself he will keep on doing so.

But there's nothing useful he can find and a lot of things he doesn't understand. The room with walls painted with blood is not giving anything away, and neither do the other rooms that look just like it. 

After some hours, he finds water. A few bottles, nothing that will save him for long, but enough to save him now, save him for a few days. He carries them all to the door, puts the bottles next to it. Drags Jones away and deeper into the hallways, into one of the empty rooms. Finds the other vampire's body and does the same.

It reminds him of the hospital, of all his routines. The little world he shared with Doc, as safe as anything could possibly be. He misses it.

The absence of food and light and someone else's heartbeat have turned time into a caricature of itself, drawn out like an image in a funny mirror. There is no way to measure it in the cage Doc put him in, nothing but his hunger and thirst to tell him that time is passing. But his body could be a liar. It has been before. 

He thinks it must have been days. He fever-dreams it being years, the world outside going back to normal, shaking off all the vampires and nightmare-days. Axel dreams of sunrises and clear skies outside the walls surrounding him, and when he wakes, he screams out in rage because this old new world has forgotten him.

He doesn't quite remember the last time he felt like this.

He is so hungry. If Jones hadn't been infected, if Axel had fire and a better knife, he would have cut the body into pieces to eat it. He knows that it wouldn't have helped much, wouldn't have helped for long, but he will be fighting for days, soon enough, hours, of survival. 

Axel dreams of Vanessa; he dreams of a girl outside of a cage. Wakes up and finds himself still a prisoner. He tells himself it's funny.

After he lost time, he loses hope.

He isn't at the door when it finally opens, is deeper in the quarantine zone, looking for more water, looking for something, anything, that could help him, free him, end him.

Axel doesn't even hear them coming, doesn't hear the first vampire approach until it's right behind him. He spins around then, raises his fists to fight. But it's been days, and he's fading away. So he stumbles and he falls and he doesn't get up.

The vampire stares at him, more curious than hungry, well-fed, and Axel wonders if it ran into Doc and the rest, almost hopes for it. “I found something,” it says. “A human.”

It turns to another vampire, and it's Catherine, and Axel starts laughing because he threw her out of the hospital after her and Brendan locked him into a cage, threw her out and now she opened a door for him.

She looks at him, they all do, but she is the only one smiling, her teeth white even in the darkness of the hallway.

“Something funny?” one of the vampires asks, and Axel nods.

“Believe me, everything is,” and his own voice scares him, the way it sounds brittle and hollow and unused. Hopeless, he thinks.

When Catherine bends down to him, he holds still, forces himself to be unmoving even when she touches him. Her hands are warm against his face. 

He expected them to be cold.

“This one,” Catherine says, and her voice reminds him of the screams that rang through the streets after the Rising, reminds him of blood and terror and all the ways he lost hope. “This one is mine.”

He's almost glad.

She pulls him up with rough hands, and Axel stumbles into her body. It, too, is warm beneath his weight, alive, and strong enough to carry him. She doesn't push him away. Instead, her fingers lock with his in a painful mockery of all the times he held hands with a woman he liked and loved. Axel thinks she might break his fingers one by one, waits for the pain and the awful sounds of it. It doesn't scare him, not as long as she gets him out of the Farm.

And she does.

Outside, the world is still the same. The sunlight weak, anaemic; the roads giving way to decay and grass; ruin and disaster turned to desolation. But it's the world, it's the horizon promising just one more day, and it's all so shockingly terrifying and beautiful.

Axel stands still for moments, stands still as long as Catherine lets him, taking it all in. It feels a bit like falling in love, like waking from a nightmare that stretched out for most of the night to find out that everything was just fine.

“Come,” Catherine says, her order barely hidden under the smile she wraps it in. “It's time to go.” And he almost asks her where they're going, almost asks her what the vampires are planning. Weeks ago, he probably would have. He would have fought her, too, and Axel likes to think that he would have won.

But things have changed, have fractured and broken; the hospital is gone, Vanessa is gone. And Doc....Doc he doesn't think about, can't think about. Instead, he looks away from the sky and the world. He looks at Catherine, at her brittle skin and sharp smile, a promise of strength and pain.

And he falls in step with her.


End file.
